After Santorum’s Exit: Can Obama Be Beaten?

Now that Rick Santorum has quit the Republican primary, effectively leaving the nomination to Mitt Romney, this is a good moment to step back and look at where the general election stands.

Most political professionals, including many Republicans, think that President Obama will win reëlection handily—and this belief is reflected in the betting markets. At Ladbroke’s, the British bookmaker, the odds on an Obama victory are four-to-nine, which means you have to bet ninety dollars to win forty. These odds imply that the chance of Obama winning is about sixty-nine per cent. At Intrade, an online-trading exchange, the implied probability of an Obama victory is a bit lower, but only a bit: sixty-one per cent.

Despite having been an early proponent of the view that things were shifting in Obama’s direction, I am reluctant to embrace the new conventional wisdom that the result is virtually a foregone conclusion. If the past few months have taught us anything, it is that things can change pretty rapidly in American politics. Unlike Walter Mondale in 1984 or Bob Dole in 1996, Romney isn’t a complete no-hoper. According to a new poll from ABC News and the Washington Post, three in four Americans still think that the economy is in recession, and, by a margin of four percentage points, voters trust Romney more than Obama to handle the economy.

Clearly, though, there has been a turn. Back in October, Obama’s approval ratings were languishing in the low forties; head-to-head polls showed him lagging Romney in many battleground states, such as Florida; and the unemployment rate stood at 9.1 per cent. Since then, what a reversal of fortune we’ve seen. The Republicans have been attacking each other incessantly and driving up Romney’s negative ratings; the economy and the stock market have both perked up; the unemployment rate has fallen to 8.2 per cent; and almost all of the polls have swung in the President’s favor.

For ease of exposition, I’ll divide the latest polling data into three areas: personal approval ratings; national polls; and state-by-state polls. In each case, I’ll highlight the good news for Obama, and the bits of encouragement, if there are any, for the Republicans.

1. Personal Approval Ratings: Yesterday, Gallup’s Frank Newport and Lydia Saad published an article highlighting how the President’s approval rating has rebounded in the firm’s daily tracking poll, which is the industry standard. Last fall, the monthly average hit a low of forty-one percent. In March, it reached forty-six percent, and last week, for the first time in a year, the three-day average hit fifty per cent. (According to today’s update from Gallup, the approval rating is forty-four per cent. Because the daily numbers bounce around quite a bit, the weekly and monthly figures are more reliable.)

Other polling organizations also show Obama’s approval ratings climbing back toward fifty per cent, which is widely regarded as a key threshold. (Since the Second World War, no President with an approval rating at or above that figure has failed to be reëlected.) For example, a new poll out today from ABC News/Washington Post shows it at fifty per cent exactly, up from forty-six per cent this time last month.

That’s all positive news for Obama. At the same time, though, by historic standards his approval rating remains fairly low. In April, 1996, according to a Gallup poll, fifty-four per cent of Americans approved of the job Bill Clinton was doing. In April 2004, George W. Bush’s approval rating was fifty-two per cent. Obama looks more vulnerable than either Clinton or Bush. Unfortunately for the G.O.P., he doesn’t seem as vulnerable as Jimmy Carter or George H. W. Bush, the last two incumbents who went down to defeat. At this stage of their Presidencies, Carter and George H. W. Bush both had sub-forty per cent approval ratings in the Gallup poll.

2. National Polls: The new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows Obama with a healthy seven-point lead over Romney in a head-to-head matchup: fifty-one per cent to forty-four per cent. To a greater or lesser extent, other polls deliver a similar message. According to the latest Real Clear Politics poll-of-polls, Obama is leading Romney by more than five points: 48.5 per cent to 43.2 per cent. At the start of the year, they were virtually tied.

About the only encouraging thing in these numbers for Romney is that after all the negative publicity he’s received recently, he’s still within striking distance. Candidates have come from further back than he is to win the Presidency. In May, 1988, according to a New York Timespoll, Michael Dukakis was leading George H. W. Bush by ten points: forty-nine per cent to thirty-nine per cent. In the general election, Bush defeated Dukakis by almost eight points: 53.4 per cent to 45.7 per cent. (The parallel isn’t exact, of course. As Ronald Reagan’s Vice-President, Bush was essentially running as an incumbent.)

3. State-by-State Polls. Last week’s poll from USA Today/Gallup showing Obama leading Romney by nine points—fifty-one per cent to forty-two per cent—in twelve battleground states got a lot of ink, and justifiably so. But it only confirmed the message that has been coming from individual surveys in places like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania: Obama is surging.

Because of the electoral map, Florida is crucial—particularly to the Republicans. If Romney doesn’t win there, it is very difficult to see him getting the two-hundred-and-seventy votes he needs. This would remain true even if he wins states like North Carolina and Virginia—traditional Republican strongholds that Obama won in 2008 and where he again is mounting a big challenge.

As recently as late January, Romney was polling pretty well in Florida. A Miami Herald/Mason Dixon poll showed him four points ahead. But according to a more recent survey by Quinnipiac University, he is now trailing Obama in a head-to-head matchup by seven points: forty-nine per cent to forty-two per cent. The same polling organization showed Obama leading Romney by six points in Ohio and three points in Pennsylvania. “President Barack Obama is on a roll in the key swing states,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “If the election were today, he would carry at least two states”—out of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—“and if history repeats itself, that means he would be reëlected.”

Conclusion: If the G.O.P. is to have any chance of taking back the White House, it needs to start turning around these numbers. Although Santorum’s exit isn’t likely to have much immediate impact on the polling data, it does give Romney an opportunity to reframe the race as a referendum on Obama rather than a contest among unpopular Republicans. At the same time, he can start to repair some of the damage that the primary race has done to his own standing. With the challenge from the right largely removed—there is still Newt—he should be able to tack back to the center, which, as the Etch A Sketch gaffe made clear, is what he was intending to do along.

Another urgent task is to narrow the gender gap, which Santorum, with his out-of-the-mainstream views on contraception and abortion, helped widen into a chasm. In the USA Today/Gallup poll, Romney was trailing Obama by a stunning eighteen points among women in battleground states. Inevitably, a lot of attention will be focussed on the possibility of Romney selecting a plausible Republican woman as his running mate. But where is she to be found? Most of the obvious candidates are very conservative. And as a former C.E.O. himself, he can hardly pick a moderate businesswoman like Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina.

The choice of a Vice-Presidential candidate is just one of many challenges facing the Mittster. At long last, though, he’s getting some encouraging news. The weak job figures for March removed the smiles from President Obama’s economic advisers. Four days later, his main Republican opponent has bowed out of the race. With Santorum gone, the big media outlets will probably start treating Romney with a bit more respect—if only to build up the general election as an appealing story.

For this and other reasons, the race is likely to tighten up over the coming weeks and months. Like most of my fellow scribblers (and most bettors), I think Obama will ultimately come out the victor, but elections aren’t decided in April. Lord help us, we have another two hundred and ten days of this stuff. So, let’s calm down and see whether the Mittster can make a fist of it. After all, isn’t he supposed to be a turnaround artist?